Rid your Twitter feed of retweets from anyone you follow

By Matt Elliott2013-10-11

There is a setting you may have overlooked that lets you keep retweets from anyone you follow from appearing in your feed.

I want to follow Ricky Gervais, I really do. I have loved him ever since he introduced me to David Brent, and I enjoy his ongoing personal war on Twitter against organized religion. But, Ricky, the retweets!

Ricky Gervais is a chronic retweeter. These promotional or uninteresting retweets clutter my feed and lessen my enjoyment of Ricky Gervais's otherwise humorous presence on Twitter. Thanks to this post on Wired, I can now remove Ricky Gervais's retweets from my feed without unfollowing him. There is no trick to it; it's simply a setting I have overlooked. Perhaps you have not stumbled upon it either. Hence, allow me to explain where to find this setting.

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First, go to Twitter.com (as opposed to a Twitter client) and click on your profile. Next, click on Following to see the list of the people you follow. Locate any egregious retweeters and click on the gray silhouette button just to the left of the blue Following button. Finally, from the drop-down menu, select Turn off Retweets. This will keep any retweets from this person from appearing in your feed, though any manual retweets -- those that someone has copied and pasted into a tweet with an RT and perhaps a comment -- will still show up.

You'll also find the same silhouette button with the Turn off Retweets option when viewing someone's profile -- and in more places. I found it using the mobile app on both the iPhone and
iPad when viewing a person's profile, when this button didn't make an appearance on the Following page.